en, replies, "I loathe _all_
children!" (January 13, 1880).

[Illustration: Illustration for "Wives and Daughters"

_The Cornhill_, 1864.]

Section 7

The story of children's conversation has perhaps never been told quite
so charmingly as du Maurier tells it. We could quote endlessly from the
admirably constructed nursery dialogues in which he does not attempt to
make a joke, and in which he very carefully refrains from giving a
fantastic precocity to his little characters--dialogues in which he is
quite content to rely upon our sympathetic knowledge of children's way
of putting things, while he rests the appeal of the drawing and legend
entirely upon a _naive_ literalness to their remarks. The charming
atmosphere of the well-ordered nursery must be felt by readers, and then
we can quote from the text of some of his drawings of the kind; this we
shall do somewhat at random and as they come to mind.

"Are you asleep, dearest? Yes, Mamma, and the Doctor particularly
said that I wasn't to be waked to take my medicine" (_July_ 10,
1880).

"Oh, Auntie! There's your tiresome cook's been and filled my egg
too full" (_April_ 22, 1882).

Already we are seized with misgivings as to whether, with the reader
very much on the look-out for the jokes, we shall be successful in
making our point in claiming for du Maurier that, as much as any author
who has ever written upon children, he captures "the note" of children's
speeches. But anyhow we will try.

For an instance there is the delightful picture of a child clasping its
mother round the knees, whilst the mother, shawled for an evening
concert, bends affectionately down--

"Good Night! Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma! I like you
to go out, because if you didn't you'd never come home again, you
know."

The artist perhaps invented this pretty speech, but the "Good Night!
Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma" is of the very spirit of the
redundancy by which children hope in heaping words together to express
accumulation of emotion. Du Maurier's children never make the nasty pert
answers upon which, for their nearly impossible but always vulgar
smartness, the providers of jokes about children for the comic papers
generally depend. He is simply going on with his "novel"--_The Tale of
the House_ it might be called--when he affords us realistic glimpses of
nursery conversation.

_Mamma_. "What is Baby crying for, M